Don't forget the trailing / on the URL you pass to Apache Bench.

August 2, 2011 dancroak apache bench dynos heroku performance load testing 7 minute ab: impatient man’s load tests for a Heroku app We’ve been working with a client who recently launched a new service. The launch entailed their marketing team sending batches of emails to a 1 million+ person mailing list over 2 days. In the email, there’s a link to the homepage. The client wanted some confidence that the home page of the Rails app, which is hosted on Heroku, would be able to handle the load generated from that traffic. They didn’t need a heavy-duty load test, just a little assurance. In turn, I wanted something that was quick to set up and execute. To repeat, I don’t consider this a rigorous load test. For that, look at something like Blitz.io or Tsung . This is a quick-and-dirty alternative. Apache Bench It doesn’t get quicker than apache bench : man ab The ab command I en...